Geek Estate Blog

An affordable, sustainable solution to unsheltered homelessness

Wed, 20 Jan 2021 22:42:31 GMT

[Note from editor: The “Mastermind Showcase” highlights companies and news from members of the GEM. Today’s showcase: Pallet.]

Pallet builds durable, portable, and affordable shelters for the more than half a million people facing homelessness across the U.S. They offer a 64 square foot version starting at $4,900 as well as a 100 square foot version starting at $7,000.

Prefabricated at Pallet’s factory headquarters, the shelters are shipped on a wood pallet in seven panel pieces, are built in less than one hour with minimal tools, and come outfitted with beds, climate control, safety features, electricity, and more.

They offer a stepping stone out of personal crisis and into a life of stability. They hire and invest in people actively engaged in recovery and reintegration.

As of January 2021, Pallet has assembled hundreds of shelters across 9 states nationwide, including the Riverside community with 30 emergency shelters and the 60 houses they stood up in Sonoma County.

Click here for a virtual tour of Pallet’s 64-square foot personal shelter.

What we like: A social-purpose company putting an end to unsheltered homelessness; but, Pallet’s mission doesn’t stop with it’s shelters. The majority of employees have first-hand lived experience with homelessness, addiction, or incarceration. Turnkey rapid deployment of housing is a win-win all the way around.

Learn More

The post An affordable, sustainable solution to unsheltered homelessness appeared first on GeekEstate Blog.

Meet the Real Estate Tech Entrepreneur: Ajay Prakash from Rinse

Wed, 20 Jan 2021 04:07:16 GMT

We interviewed Ajay Prakash from Rinse in the third installation of our real estate tech entrepreneur interview series of 2021.

Let’s get to it!

Who are you and what do you do?

Thanks for including me as part of this series. My name is Ajay Prakash and I am the Co-Founder and CEO of Rinse. We are building the first and largest national brand in clothing care and removing the friction that exists in dry cleaning and laundry.

What problem does your product/service solve?

Rinse is making trips to the dry cleaner and the washer & dryer obsolete while building the first national brand in clothing care. Simply put, we pick up, clean, and deliver our customers’ dry cleaning and laundry straight to their doors and let them focus on more important things. We launched in 2013 on a mission to remove all of the friction that exists on both sides of the dry cleaning and laundry business. With Rinse, we’ve created a superior experience for our customers, while standardizing processes and helping our local cleaning partners survive and thrive.

What are you most excited about right now?

2020 has been a very challenging year for our industry, but I believe the future for clothing care remains bright. I’m most excited about the path that Rinse is on and my hope is that we will emerge stronger coming out of the pandemic. We have built a service that gives our customers back 3+ hours per week on average to focus on themselves and their family, something that is more important than ever these days. In addition, we have developed some new products that make it easier for customers to use and discover Rinse. Specifically, Rinse Repeat, our subscription laundry product; Rinse for Business, the first employee benefit that picks up and delivers employees’ laundry and dry cleaning at their homes or offices; and Rinse for Rentals, a convenient add-on building amenity that brings our door-to-door laundry and dry cleaning services to renters everywhere.

What’s next for you?

Growth. We have started to see signs of recovery in dry cleaning, and we are well-positioned for strong growth in 2021 and beyond. Growth will come from continuing to scale and take market share in our existing markets (Bay Area, LA, DC, Chicago, and Boston) and launching new markets as we continue to expand our footprint. In addition, we are actively exploring acquisitions in our space. We have completed four to date, including our recent acquisition of DRYV in Chicago, and are excited to use M&A as a growth lever as we continue to scale and build the dominant national brand in the industry.

What’s a cause you’re passionate about and why?

Outside of Rinse, the thing I am most passionate about is spending time with my wife and three daughters (ages 6, 3.5, and 2). The combination of building a startup and a family at the same time has been my primary focus for 7+ years now. In terms of causes that I am spending time on, one I am most interested in these days is climate change. My wife has dedicated a lot of her time and energy to climate change and I have become passionate (and educated) about the cause as a by-product, and it is an area that I plan to spend a lot more of my personal time and energy in and around going forward. In addition, Rinse has been eco-friendly since the beginning, with a focus on working with non-PERC cleaners, saving water and electricity, and taking clothing donations to minimize fashion waste. We plan to do even more in 2021 and beyond to not only make our practices even more environmentally-friendly but also accelerate change across our industry.

Thanks to Ajay for sharing his story. If you’d like to connect, find him on LinkedIn here.

We’re constantly looking for great real estate tech entrepreneurs to feature. If that’s you, please read this post — then drop us a line (Community @ geekestatelabs dot com).

The post Meet the Real Estate Tech Entrepreneur: Ajay Prakash from Rinse appeared first on GeekEstate Blog.

Meet The Real Estate Tech Entrepreneur: Justin Fichelson from Avenue 8

Wed, 13 Jan 2021 02:11:44 GMT

We interviewed Justin Fichelson from Avenue 8 in the second real estate tech entrepreneur interview of 2021.

Let’s get to it!

Who are you and what do you do?

I’m the CEO and co-founder of Avenue 8, the only mobile-first real estate brokerage built expressly for modern agents. Our platform gives agents all the tools and support they need to be successful and entrepreneurial, to close from anywhere, and to keep substantially more of their income.

Just like how you would order dinner from Postmates or a car from Uber – we’re making real estate transactions for agents as simple as buying something online. Entrepreneurial agents can run their entire business from Avenue 8’s digital platform, from listing on multiple MLS data feeds, to generating real-time market insights, automating omni-channel marketing tasks, to digital stagings and closings.

What problem does your product/service solve?

Avenue 8’s been thoughtfully designed from the ground up to be the most efficient and user-friendly digital real estate platform for agents. Agents are a critically important part of the home buying/selling process, yet they are radically underserved – many are beholden to an age-old brokerage model that elevates infrastructure over individuals.

If you look at the industry, there are some 90K brokerages that exist today essentially as an office for agents to print materials. On the VC side, there’s been a ton of interest in companies trying to be solutions for buyers and sellers – even attempting to cut out the go-between of the agent.

Today, our world is very different- agents don’t need an office, they are doing everything at home or on the go and they are critical to the real estate process. We believe there’s a gap in innovation in terms of how they function and become more successful. Because when agents do their job better – everyone wins.

What are you most excited about right now?

Right now I’m most excited about Avenue 8 having a significant impact on reshaping the real estate industry from the brokerage level up. We just closed our Series A funding and the next steps are to expand the team, further develop the product, and launch in new markets. We’re setting out to make it easier for agents to provide the best service to their customers by providing an easy-to-use and thoughtfully-designed platform that also saves them time and money.

What’s next for you?

We’re really looking forward to expanding our footprint over the next 6 months! Right now Avenue 8 is live in the Bay Area and Southern California and we’ve already started thinking about our next launch locations for this coming year. Beyond that, we’re looking to expand agents, our team, and product offerings.

What’s a cause you’re passionate about and why?

I’ve always loved art and design, and in many ways, real estate is a form of art. Real estate as a medium works directly with the visual form, it’s art, design and architecture all in one. I’m personally involved with several arts organizations within music education and architectural preservation. These include the Board of Trustees of Orchestra Europa and past involvement with the Fine Arts Museums of SF.

Thanks to Justin for sharing his story. If you’d like to connect, find him on LinkedIn here.

We’re constantly looking for great real estate tech entrepreneurs to feature. If that’s you, please read this post — then drop us a line (Community @ geekestatelabs dot com).

The post Meet The Real Estate Tech Entrepreneur: Justin Fichelson from Avenue 8 appeared first on GeekEstate Blog.

A Mortgage Lender First-Time Buyers can Trust

Tue, 12 Jan 2021 23:36:24 GMT

A digital mortgage lender built for first-time home buyers, Homebuyer’s platform includes built-in features like interactive lesson plans for home buyers, comparative loan searching, personalized content, and customizable communication methods to ensure every home buyer gets the right advice at the right time. With no commissioned salespeople, Homebuyer can lean into its fiduciary responsibilities, giving their customers helpful, non-biased help to buy a home. Homebuyer is powered by Novus Home Mortgage, a division of Ixonia Bank NMLS 423065.

Has raised a total of $1.52 million, including a $125K pre-seed round led by Techstars and a $1.4 million seed round from private investors.

What we like: Dan is one of the sharpest mortgage loan officers there is. His experience as the founder of The Mortgage Reports coupled with an innate talent for next-level real-estate content marketing creates a brand-new mortgage experience for first-time home buyers worth learning from.

Learn More

The post A Mortgage Lender First-Time Buyers can Trust appeared first on GeekEstate Blog.

A Look Forward to 2021: De-Carbonization Is King

Mon, 11 Jan 2021 19:13:32 GMT

[Note from the editor: Below is a collection of 2021 predictions and trends sourced from members of the GEM. Originally published privately for members a week ago, but we are sharing them more broadly here. —Drew Meyers]

A Look Forward to 2021: De-Carbonization Is King

BY DREW MEYERS
Originally Published: January 7th, 2021

Following an uncertain, turbulent year, even more turbulence is just around the corner. We need to talk about climate change. Facts are facts; science is science. No matter where you stand in the debate about the causes of climate change, it’s coming.

Sure, the United States will rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement on Biden’s watch. That’s good for the future sustainability of real estate—and any other industry, really. But at this point we can only hope to slow the acceleration of the climate crisis—it still looms on the horizon.

To avoid another pandemic, we need to use hard cash to address the effects of climate change. At the recent CREtech global summit, Brendan Wallace from Fifth Wall explained his view that investment should anchor real estate companies’ sustainability and ESG programs. They are putting their money where their mouth is: Fifth Wall recently hired Greg Smithies from BMW iVentures to co-lead the Climate Technology Investment teamand is raising a $200 million climate fund.

An interesting interview with Greg is here:

Climate funds are now de rigueur across tech. Microsoft is putting $1 billion into a climate fund while Amazon is allocating $2 billion. A sustainable future is coming—shuttled along faster by growing tenant demands and government regulations—with or without real estate asset owners. Aurora Solar’s $50 million Series B and View’s SPAC announcement are just the beginning. The train has left the station: The time to invest is now. The seeds for years upon years of tech to fuel decarbonization will be planted in 2021.

Below is a range of trends of interest and predictions for 2021, sourced from the GEM membership base…

PROPTECH TRENDS

SUPER TEAMS TAKE CENTER STAGE
Guy Gal // Founder & CEO, Side

Agent teams consolidating market share will continue to intensify, as it did throughout the pandemic. Everhome Real Estate, now netting north of $200 million in annual sales, is just one example of the formation of “superteams.”

This trend emerged at Side four years ago, and it will continue to play out across the industry until far fewer agents work in teams to represent a much larger share of total transactions. This is great for the consumer, for the public good, and for dedicated experienced full-time real estate agents and teams. It’s terrible for traditional brokerage models that make most of their money from less productive agents that pay much higher fees and facilitate transactions as a group of 1M+ part-time and casual practitioners.

RATES STAY IN THE ONE-PERCENT
Dan Green // Founder & CEO, Homebuyer

Mortgage rates will fall through at least Q1 2021. Home buyers blessed with fortuitous timing will get rates beginning with a one.

Eventually, rates will climb. They’ll tack on 100 basis points in a month. There will be talk that rising rates will grind housing to a halt. It will only be talk, though—actual home buyers won’t care that mortgage rates are up. They’ll continue to relocate, and first-time buyers will take advantage of the Biden First-Time Buyer Tax Credit in larger-than-expected numbers.

Furthermore, the FHA will reduce both upfront mortgage insurance premiums and monthly insurance premiums for its borrowers, reducing homeownership costs this year.

By Q4, mortgage rates will reach a plateau before slow-sliding into 2022.

OFFLINE TO ONLINE ACCELERATION + “THE GREAT RESHUFFLING”
Errol Samuelson // Chief Industry Development Officer, Zillow Group

2020 further revealed the need to simplify, streamline and digitize antiquated processes such as in-person appraisals, filings, and closings, to meet the needs of today’s home shoppers. In real estate, the shift offline to online is accelerating and the virtual tools consumers have adopted for safety are quickly becoming their expectations for convenience.

As we look at the broader housing market, we believe the trends we saw in 2020 will have a positive and lasting impact in 2021 and beyond. In 2020, home was the headquarters of our lives. We spent the year retooling the meaning of home, work, and life in between. The experience has uncorked new aspirations and hopes of what home can and needs to be.

The shift to remote work will have a lasting and positive impact on real estate. First-time home buyers in major cities are no longer tied to neighborhoods close to the office, and many are searching for homes with more space for a home office or other family needs. This shift is what we call “The Great Reshuffling,” and we believe it will be the defining cultural trend of the decade. Demographics support our expectation of a lasting interest in home-buying as millions of Millennials are entering their prime home-buying years. As people reimagine and reshape the way they work, live and play, they increasingly will be relying on new technology to safely navigate their lives.

CONTACTLESS TRANSACTIONS
Dave Garland // Managing Partner, Second Century Ventures

The pandemic has paved the way for touchless experiences across the entire real estate sector from virtual staging and listing tools to digital escrow and remote online notarization. Sizeable deals illustrate the flow of capital to support the incredible demand for contactless tools including;

Compass acquisition of digital closing startup Modus
Stewart acquisition of NotaryCam
Video tour software company Realync’s recent $22M raise
A surge of investor confidence in shares of DocuSign

While the pandemic has been a catalyst for demand, many of these virtual tools have been around for years, some inhibited by regulation. As demand rises at unprecedented levels with continued pandemic restrictions in place, we expect to see more support on a federal level for digital products and services. Online notarization, for example, is currently only available in 23 states–though legislation introduced in March through the SECURE act would open it up to consumers in all states.

Contactless tools will also serve the commercial sector as businesses return to offices at adapted capacities and as developers evaluate alternative space planning.

MORE POLICIES PUSH TECHNOLOGY IN RENTALS
Ryan Coon // Co-founder & CEO, Avail

Governments will continue enacting policies to improve rentals for landlords and tenants. We’ll see more efforts to encourage reporting of on-time rent payments, security deposit alternatives, and perhaps even a rental registry. With technology, rental markets will become more transparent, more efficient, and more fair for everyone.

BFR IS A BFD
Dennis Steigerwalt // President, Housing Innovation Alliance

The single-family homes Built For Rent (BFR) category is experiencing significant growth as both a housing product and an industry.

Over the next several years, single-family residential construction will experience a period of rapid growth, adaption, and innovation impacting the way the industry operates and evolves to deliver both for rent and for sale products. Although BFR makes up small portion of residential construction today, with established industry leaders and emerging players quickly taking strong positions and billions in new capital allocations announced almost monthly, there is an implied need for speed, quality, and performance with a long-term investment horizon which creates a game-changing opportunity for widescale adoption of innovation.

Outside influencers and stakeholders are looking at this through the lens of industry analysis developed by teams at McKinsey & Company and Dodge Data & Analytics. This tipping point for innovation, in what has been a slow-to-digitize space, will not only affect rental product but yield positive spillover effects into the single-family for sale solutions. This opens the door for long-awaited industry advancements in automation, integration of robotics, new building materials, and new partnerships which will significantly disrupt the existing supply chain.

The net result will be both an opportunity and threat for existing players through the evolution of new and more productive business models, partnerships, and capital opportunities. We believe that the BFR industry will be a key element in the improvement of the productivity of the overall housing industry and will be an important driver in the improvement in housing availability and attainability.

What to watch for…

Single-family homes built new, specifically for rent, at scale and in communities, has come of age. It took a decade to be understood and accepted but that acceptance is now set. Many of the underlying trends, such as suburban migration and the erosion of societal bias towards renting, supporting this segment were accelerated by the pandemic.
The next stage of industry development will be in the refinement of the business model, including the introduction of more digital tools for customer acquisition, an expansion of factory-built off-site solutions for production, new forms of customer financial relationships, and an evolution in a customer service model that will drive higher value.
These evolutions will serve to accelerate products and methods that will prove to be superior to those currently used in the for sale industry, these will be translated and adopted by for sale builders – accelerating innovation there as well. Increasingly, companies with this product as their primary offering will be joined by others where both rentals and sales are offered side by side.
Many of the coming changes will be driven by new entities, Joint Ventures, and partnerships. Supply chains will be reformed and new relationships among existing players will be developed.

BIG DATA BECOMES A BIG DEAL
Rachel Allard // SVP Strategy, Union Street Media

The technology used to collect and use consumer data is changing. And major tech companies are battling for the survival of their ad businesses as they know it. Increased focus on privacy and regulation such as GDPR and CCPA have forced changes to third party tracking, which fuels online advertising. For example, Google is eliminating support for third party cookies and Apple will require apps to receive permission from users before collecting their data—Facebook is waging a war against Apple to prevent that change (with 100 million iPhone users in the U.S. alone, the Facebook app would be hugely affected). These changes could fundamentally shift how real estate companies acquire and reach their customers online.

There is a solution: Invest in first-party and big data capabilities. Companies are really going to have to think about how they structure, track, and take action from their owned and operated digital properties and the people who interact with them. This likely means an end to rapidly spinning up new content without an overarching strategy, and the start of reconsidering how to create and measure the best customer experience, as well as how to marry online and offline data. Other industries have focused on this for a decade plus, so it’s about time real estate catches up.

A NEW AGE OF AFFORDABLE URBAN HOUSING RISES
Bryan Copley // Founder & CEO, CityBldr

In its quest to upset everything we know, 2020 has offered a possible fix for the affordable housing crisis. Where that housing will be located is the real surprise: in the heart of large cities.

Commuting to the office previously drove workers to live near their workplaces. The ork from anywhere phenomenon (and the success of this global, synchronized experiment for many companies) has driven the epicenter of housing demand outside the urban core.

Housing prices have shot up in the suburbs in response to excess demand for all housing types, but only luxury and class A housing has seen major price declines in cities. Why? Because those who can’t work from home still want housing near their jobs, and 88% of jobs are located in metro areas.

Because of this, affordable urban housing has virtually inexhaustible demand.

Reasons cities will start delivering unprecedented volumes of affordable housing in 2021:

Steep rent declines. Urban rents have dropped—a trend that will continue into late 2021. This increases the affordability of existing multifamily housing stock as work from anywhere proliferates beyond the pandemic (albeit at a slower pace due to the COVID-19 vaccine and an inevitable end to the pandemic).
Modular housing companies are maturing from early stage (Seed and Series A) to growth stage—where the mandate shifts from realizing product market fit to accelerating growth at scale—at the perfect time.
Cities will either throw weight behind promising solutions to the urban affordability crisis or suffer the one-two punch of rapidly declining tax bases coupled with rapidly increasing homelessness. Things can still worsen from here. Smart cities know this, and will act decisively before the problem is beyond their control.

Let the new urban age commence.

DEBUNKING THE CITY EXODUS
Brad Cartier // Head of Marketing, Hostfully

Despite the ongoing analysis and data surrounding the flight to rural, small town, and suburban living as a result of the pandemic, we will begin to rethink the positive value of city-living.

Outside of a handful of expensive urban centers (NYC, Seattle, Austin, etc), city planners, architects, investors, and community organizers will find new ways to optimize real estate assets for safe and enjoyable interaction between residents/tenants and spaces. The “15-minute city” (see: Newsletter #147) will become mainstream, and the increased popularity of light densification initiatives will propel a renewed interest in urban spaces for all.

TAX POLICIES FUEL UNPRECEDENTED CORPORATE ENTERTAINMENT SPEND
Brian Mommsen // Founder & CEO, Resident

As vaccines are deployed and we reach herd immunity, companies will race to bring human connectedness back–both internally as well as with external customers/partners/stakeholders. Though I suspect the shift back to five-day a week office life will be a multi-year crawl, new tax policies will trigger an explosion of corporate entertainment spend by year’s end. Deducting 50% of meal expenses on federal taxes has been the case since the 1980’s. However, “A proposal championed by the White House and Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) would increase that deduction to 100 percent,” according to The Washington Post.

Restaurants and brands strong enough to survive could see their best margins in decades thanks to increased corporate spending, lower rents, and an expanded outdoor dining footprint.

RESI PREDICTIONS

STOCK PRICES FOR ZILLOW, REDFIN, AND REALOGY TUMBLE BY AT LEAST 20%
Terry Dwyer // Consultant

All three companies have track records going back at least a few years and all three (along with a good part of the market) have benefited tremendously from what Alan Greenspan described in the late 1990’s as “irrational exuberance.” By any rational valuation measure, all three are way overvalued. At some point, common sense will return to the stock market and this will result in some of the air being let out of these three balloons. A year from now, we’ll see at least a 20% decline over present prices.

COMPASS TAKES THE SPAC
Drew Meyers // Founder, Geek Estate

The SPAC proptech flurry is here to stay, and Compass is up next. Despite my initial questions and skepticism (which I’ve heard echoed by many others privately), the company will have no trouble portraying itself in a favorable light to the public markets. How it fares once there, well, that’s a discussion for another time. The brokerage juggernaut, complete with stellar marketing and more money than the brokerage industry has ever seen, will pull the trigger on a strategic SPAC partnership before we ring in 2022.

BUY-SIDE COMMISSION RATES NOTICEABLY TREND DOWNWARD
Terry Dwyer // Consultant

I would predict that the average buy-side commission rate will drop 50% by this time next year, but things don’t move that quickly in the brokerage business. However, by fall of 2022, I predict it will have dropped 50%. The proposed NAR/DOJ settlement will also result in a bunch of buyers’ agents dying on the vine because a 50% drop in the cost of doing business will not accompany a 50% drop in their commission rate. Jeff Corbett explored the implications of the divorcing of commissions for those interested.

EXP ACQUIRES REALOGY
Drew Meyers // Founder, Geek Estate

Rather than raising $400 to pay down debt, why not sell Realogy to eXp, the virtual brokerage growing like a weed? With eXp’s market cap ($4.23B) approaching triple that of Realogy ($1.68B), such a takeover would be a bold and risky move–but one that wouldn’t completely gut the balance sheet. There’s nothing like bringing the largest competing franchise under its umbrella, despite its debt, to kick off the new year.

CONTECH CENTRAL

Stephen Del Percio // VP & Assistant General Counsel, AECOM

THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION WILL ACT ON INFRASTRUCTURE WITH FEDERAL STIMULUS
The knock-on effects will be positive and profound for contech/proptech startups. “Infrastructure” will also include significant increases in spending on 5G rollout, data center construction, and other digital infrastructure.

CONTECH VC WILL CONTINUE TO GROW YOY
From $1.3B in 2020 (up 56% from 2019), let’s call it an even $2B that will flow to contech in 2021. Startups in the labor, remote inspection/robotics, and supply chain sectors will outperform as COVID continues to impact industry productivity and efficiency.

AEC CONSOLIDATION
Call it “COVID consolidation” if you want, but a flurry of M&A activity in the AEC sector will be led by large publicly traded players sensing an opportunity to capture increased market share and improve efficiencies. Coupled with COVID, the industry’s persistently tight margins will drive employee-owned and mid-sized public companies in particular to seek sanctuary in the arms of those large buyers.

CONTINUED SPAC ACTIVITY
At least one SPAC will merge into a well-known startup in the contech space.

INCREASED SPENDING ON AR/VR APPLICATIONS FOR BUILT ENVIRONMENT ASSETS
According to the International Data Corporation, 37.4% of all 2020 spending on AR/VR occurred in the consumer market sector, followed by distribution (23.4%) and manufacturing (19.3%), with infrastructure lagging (4.1%). Expect that last figure to increase in 2021 post-pandemic as technology improves, AEC firms continue pivoting to digital, and governments ramp up further stimulus (see my first prediction).

KATERRA BANKRUPTCY
My last—and boldest—prediction. For the sake of the industry, I hope I’m wrong about this one. But Katerra is facing headwinds, competition, and bad press. Only $200M from Softbank prevented this prediction from already coming true in 2020.

ADDING TECH LEGS TO BUILDERS
Dennis Steigerwalt // President, Housing Innovation Alliance

We’ll see an acceleration in innovation programs, where solutions are developed in partnership with national production builders acting as strategic investors to mitigate research and development risk in commercializing the next generation of game-changing core building system technologies (such as rheia’s HVAC air distribution system).

In an accelerating and disruptive environment, R&D helps create new value that also helps to differentiate from those who do not invest in R&D. Most industries invest 2-6% of revenues into R&D efforts. Broadly speaking, homebuilding barely invests at all. This “miss” lies at the feet of the boards of those companies as it gives away long-term strategic advantage and enterprise value. Who does or provides R&D to industry players, how the R&D is funded, and then what capital is needed to commercialize these new products, methods, or tools will be one of the great opportunities for those with vision in the next decade.

Closing

And, with that, that’s a wrap! Agree or disagree? What are we missing? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

GEEK ESTATE MASTERMIND BRIEFING

A PRIVATE GROUP OF INDEPENDENT THINKERS, FREE FROM SPONSORED MESSAGES, SALES PITCHES AND NOISE

There are four parts to membership:

Long-form articles covering the spectrum from shipping container co-living spaces to the battle for listing acquisition in the first iBuyer world war (Weekly Transmission).
Curated real estate, startups, & built world links & analysis blended with out of the box ideas (Weekly Radar).
Special reports (a category review of Small Landlord Prop Mgmt Software & quarterly earnings summaries).
Networking opportunities with 280+ innovators from across the globe through the private forum & in-person gatherings.

Membership is $109 / quarter

OUR MEMBER PROMISE

We deliver an exclusive, objective lens into the trends, companies, people, and ideas shaping real estate technology with thought-provoking analysis and conversations that keep you inspired every week.
We help you make better, more well-informed decisions to help grow and support people and companies making a difference in real estate.
We enable discovery and meeting others with shared interests online and in-person (whether they live near you or are traveling to the same conference).

With a mission to attract the 1,500 most forward-thinking, and diverse, innovators, we’re looking for the best and brightest in all the land...

READY TO JOIN RIGHT NOW?

Apply for Membership

NOT QUITE READY?

The post A Look Forward to 2021: De-Carbonization Is King appeared first on GeekEstate Blog.

Meet The Real Estate Tech Entrepreneur: Annelies Powell from DreamSpace

Wed, 06 Jan 2021 04:04:32 GMT

We kick off our 2021 real estate tech entrepreneur interview series with Annelies Powell from Dreamspace, a New Zealand based startup.

Let’s get to it!

Who are you and what do you do?

I’m Annelies Powell, CEO and co-founder of DreamSpace, an accelerator of vertical housing through rapid, repeatable, permits.

Our startup is working on the crux of the supply and demand housing crisis. We focus on permits as these are the key to rapid scalability of what gets built and where, and ultimately the experience of the occupants.

What problem does your product/service solve?

The housing industry keeps giving us ‘solutions’, but the reality is we all need to recalibrate our expectations on a home. Downgrade, downsize or move out of the city you love. The future of housing won’t be better than the past.

Or, at least that is what we’ve all been told.

DreamSpace thinks differently.

Our B2B2C solution will not only fundamentally change the way we scale vertical housing in cities, but will also vastly improve the outcomes. Our repeatable design and permits give way to unparalleled efficiencies so that we can give all occupants an affordable, 2000ft², spacious, private, home in the sky. It’s the future you didn’t imagine possible.

What are you most excited about right now?

Right now I’m most excited about the sales leads coming in. New Zealand (our test market) has a property market which is booming right now. People want a more convenient life, which DreamSpace is all about. I talk directly to each lead which has been invaluable to hear what users want their dream homes to be all about, their pain points, and what has them looking in the first place.

What’s next for you?

Right now we’re focusing on an early-stage capital raise. This is for our first permit and partnership with a construction company to get things built. It’s a steep learning curve and of course insanely satisfying to work on something we’re so passionate about.

What’s a cause you’re passionate about and why?

Without a doubt the prosperity of humanity working in harmony with this planet. To me, there’s no priority. I try to read books that open up my world view of people who’ve implemented large scale change for both humanity and the environment. Education, technology and the climate are some obvious themes. Naturally, these themes slip into my work, which feels like a good way to have a practical channel in taking action on bigger causes for concern in the world too.

Thanks to Annelies for sharing her story. If you’d like to connect, find her on LinkedIn here.

We’re constantly looking for great real estate tech entrepreneurs to feature. If that’s you, please read this post — then drop us a line (Community @ geekestatelabs dot com).

The post Meet The Real Estate Tech Entrepreneur: Annelies Powell from DreamSpace appeared first on GeekEstate Blog.

Coliving amidst the challenges of COVID-19

Tue, 05 Jan 2021 04:07:12 GMT

There is no other way to say it: Real Estate as an industry did not have it easy in 2020. Big plans had to be put on hold, and business growth shrunk. The sub-segment of coliving within the Real Estate industry was especially susceptible to the damage that the world-wide lockdown did to businesses.

At the beginning of this month, my team and I at TheHouseMonk launched the Global Coliving Report 2020. It was the culmination of several months of research within the coliving industry around the world, and us trying to understand how the industry dealt with this impact.

We found comfort in data that we collected directly from operators, and our analysis of geographies and their markets. There are three big takeaways from the report to touch upon here.

Coliving industry size shrunk and growth slowed down

The industry which was estimated to be worth $7.5B in 2019 stood at a market value of $7.9B in 2020. The coliving industry was growing steadily at a pace of 20% YoY but slowed down to 6% this year.

We found that both occupancy rates and rental prices reduced across most parts of the world, giving rise to the new ‘revenue-sharing’ model between operators and landlords to help soften the blow of sudden churn, and also reduce liabilities.

China sustains its position as the largest coliving market, followed by the USA and India respectively. While Europe as a collective region presents a reasonably large market, no individual country within the EU presents a large opportunity by itself.

Drop in occupancy rates and rental prices around the world

The USA and India experienced high drops in occupancy rates and were worst impacted, but South East Asia and China have shown remarkable stability in times of tough lockdowns with occupancy rates remaining nearly stable and the lowest drop in rental prices.

Funding and IPO news

The year opened up with IPOs for Chinese industry leaders Danke & Qingke, but now their market value is shrinking significantly. This combined with the pandemic slowed the movement of late-stage PE capital into the coliving industry by the end of this year.

On the bright side, multiple companies raised Series B, C, and D rounds of financing. About $200M was invested in coliving companies across the globe this year.

Most early-stage companies pushed their growth plans to 2021, hence seed and Series A rounds were infrequent this year.

The Coliving industry is still bullish on growth

We knew that Global Coliving Report needs a direct connection with operators to represent their voice in all its authenticity. The Coliving Operators Survey featured in the report does just that.

The survey observes that despite stiff challenges, the sentiments of over 100 operators from around the world suggest they are still confident that the industry is going to bounce back, albeit in its own time.

48% of respondents in the survey said they were as bullish about the industry as they have ever been, with another 45% suggesting that they remain confident in the long-term prospects.

It also noted that 48% of coliving operators continued to expand their portfolio in 2020, while 20% had to let go of certain properties and reduce their portfolio size. The remaining 32% of respondents had neither increased nor decreased their footprint this year.

Further, 72% of coliving operators feel that it would take more than 1 year for the industry to recover and get back to pre-Covid growth levels.

For those interested, the full Global Coliving Report goes to the depths of the market, understanding the industry and its major players to analyze growth in the year of the pandemic, and also what the future looks like.

The post Coliving amidst the challenges of COVID-19 appeared first on GeekEstate Blog.

Meet the Real Estate Tech Entrepreneur: William Sankey from Northspyre

Wed, 30 Dec 2020 02:09:37 GMT

In our latest real estate tech entrepreneur interview, we’re speaking with William Sankey from Northspyre.

Without further ado…

Who are you and what do you do?

My name is William Sankey and I am the Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Northspyre, a cloud-based intelligence platform that arms real estate development teams and their collaborators with proactive, data-driven insights that predict the effects of planned and unplanned changes on overall project costs and timelines.

My background is in commercial real estate. I used to be a developer and project lead for firms including Madison Realty Capital, Macklowe Properties and Jones Lang LaSalle. I worked on high-profile, multimillion-dollar ground-up developments and major renovations across the city. Through this experience, I learned that the commercial real estate industry was still extremely reliant on convoluted, error-prone spreadsheets and gut instincts to make decisions that have major implications on project costs and timelines. Also, there was no easy way to harness the treasure trove of current and historical project data to make project delivery easier and more predictable over time. So, I learned to code in my spare time and used this knowledge to automate some of my more manual, day-to-day administrative tasks as a developer. These programs informed my vision of how the industry could be transformed by automation and other technologies, and that laid the foundation for Northspyre.

What problem does your product/service solve?

Northspyre transforms project delivery, replacing developers’ gut instincts and disparate spreadsheet data with proactive decision-making technology that leverages digital dashboards, searchable project data that has been smartly indexed, and robotic intelligence to report on a project’s finances, vendors, and timeline. Northspyre helps developers and their collaborators anticipate and plan for any potential challenges or opportunities that may arise during the development process, and allow them to pivot quickly. These automated, proactive insights are generated using advanced data analytics and artificial intelligence. To date, the industry has relied heavily on institutional knowledge and manual data analysis to make important project decisions, which are difficult when the information that informs these decisions is siloed, error-prone and not updated in real-time. Relying on traditional, manual work flows stagnates productivity during the development process, resulting in reactive, less informed decision-making.

Northspyre upends the status quo so that development teams can collaborate remotely and make data-driven decisions when reviewing a vendor’s proposal or negotiating a change order – decisions that can drastically alter a project’s overall budget. It also saves hours that highly compensated developers spend on administrative work and reporting. Northspyre brings predictability to commercial real estate development, increasing efficiency and productivity, and driving better returns.

One client in the southeast is using Northspyre on a near-half-billion-dollar mixed-use development project to be more flexible and proactive. Our software allows the development team to collaborate remotely, eliminate manual data entry, upload and keep track of thousands of invoices into one cloud-based dashboard, expedite monthly cost reporting, and provide real-time visibility into the project’s budget and progress for better, more informed decision-making. This new proxy for collaboration established a single source of truth for the team to operate from and is enabling them to execute on this project within its set budget and timeline – even in the midst of the pandemic

What are you most excited about right now?

I’m humbled by Northspyre’s ability to help development teams deliver projects in the current market so that they can continue building, collaborating and innovating while working remotely. Northspyre has played a very important – albeit unexpected – role in keeping the lights on for development firms and internal real estate teams this year as the industry wrestles with lockdowns and other repercussions brought on by the pandemic.

There’s no question that this unprecedented situation has challenged commercial development teams across the board, but it’s also proving to be a vital time of transformation for many industries. I’m most excited that Northspyre will continue to help this industry – which holds a special place in my heart – get back on its feet and equip project teams with the data and insights they need to confidently address future challenges and changes that will inevitably arise – pandemic or not. It’s exciting to be a part of the technology boom in CRE and see previously tech-averse real estate teams embrace the advanced digital technology that other high-skilled industries (like modern manufacturing and finance) have leveraged for years, with great success. There is a clear appetite for software purpose-built for developers, and we’re motivated to serve the innovative thinkers in our industry who are leading the charge.

What’s next for you?

Northspyre is growing and we have big plans for the future. We saw our highest-ever user engagement this year and grew our staff to more than 30 employees to meet increased customer demand. We’re continuously bettering our software and services to reflect feedback we get directly from our customers. We consider ourselves an extension of our customers’ teams, and we take that role very seriously.

A specific area of focus for us is expanding our enterprise customer base, especially those completing ground-up developments or build-outs regularly with no way to access past project insights that could help them benchmark vendor costs and other key data points to mitigate risk. Earlier this year, we announced the launch of our Portfolio Analytics suite, which was built specifically for this purpose.

What’s a cause you’re passionate about and why?

I’ve always been very interested in social and environmental sustainability in the context of global cities. This goes beyond real estate development for me; it’s more about how we ensure the places we live, work and play meet the needs of all people, without compromising our environment – how to reduce waste; how to be equitable; how to solve for food deserts or lack of public transportation; how to promote community and share ideas that effect change. This theme is an undercurrent in my daily life and impacts the way I make decisions. I am always thinking about ways to improve quality of life for the majority and how I can contribute to the greater good.

Thanks to William for sharing his story. If you’d like to connect, find him on LinkedIn here.

We’re constantly looking for great real estate tech entrepreneurs to feature. If that’s you, please read this post — then drop us a line (Community @ geekestatelabs dot com).

The post Meet the Real Estate Tech Entrepreneur: William Sankey from Northspyre appeared first on GeekEstate Blog.

Meet the Real Estate Tech Entrepreneur: Ben McDougal from OpenOpen

Tue, 22 Dec 2020 19:20:27 GMT

In our latest real estate tech entrepreneur interview, we’re speaking with Ben McDougal from OpenOpen.

Without further ado…

Who are you and what do you do?

My name is Ben McDougal. I’m a tech founder, multimedia marketer, aspiring author and entrepreneurial ecosystem builder in our connected era

What problem does your product/service solve?

Open houses generate sales for home builders and create leads for real estate agents. While the value of open houses is clear, coordinating the ongoing schedule between multiple properties and a team of realtors became a recurring hassle.

We built OpenOpen as an internal workflow tool to save time and reduce confusion. This open house scheduler allowed our home building company to have more of our available properties open to the public. For agents, this mobile app made it easy to host more open houses, even if the home was not their own listing. The win/win results were remarkable, so our team commercialized the platform. Welcome to OpenOpen!

What are you most excited about right now?

Creating art that fuels positive change in a time where we can all do more with less. As an entrepreneur, I enjoy solving problems and building within a passionate and hard-working community of fellow founders. I’ve learned the energy of accelerating others is unmatched and while OpenOpen is a slick little tool built to do one thing well, it’s neat knowing our team is helping others continue to build.

What’s next for you?

Our friendly team is now onboarding early adopters. Who’s a good fit? Home builders who want to optimize their open house experience. Also, brokerage owners who are eager to differentiate their agency by expanding access to open house for their team of agents. If you’re ready to save time while unlocking more open houses, activate your free trial by visiting https://OpenOpen.com/free-trial.

What’s a cause you’re passionate about and why?

Using the art of connection to break down barriers to entrepreneurship. One way I’ve taken action is my participation in a program provided by the Kauffman Foundation, called 1 Million Cups. This community-driven event brings entrepreneurs together over coffee every Wednesday morning. With concise presentations from entrepreneurs each week, 1MC connects, educates and accelerates entrepreneurs while helping to unite entrepreneurial ecosystems in over 150 communities nationwide. Why 1 Million Cups? Entrepreneurship is a lonely rollercoaster. Connecting into a community is essential to evolving ideas in reality. Along with the innovative energy I receive from the stories of fellow founders at 1MC each week, it’s provided a consistent way to help others pursue their own entrepreneurial ventures. Keep building!

Thanks to Ben for sharing his story. If you’d like to connect, find him on LinkedIn here.

We’re constantly looking for great real estate tech entrepreneurs to feature. If that’s you, please read this post — then drop us a line (Community @ geekestatelabs dot com).

The post Meet the Real Estate Tech Entrepreneur: Ben McDougal from OpenOpen appeared first on GeekEstate Blog.

Outfit: Not Boring Investment Memo

Tue, 22 Dec 2020 16:15:10 GMT

[Editor’s note: Originally published at Not Boring.]

A couple of weeks ago, Fed Novikov, the co-founder of another Not Boring portfolio company that’s using software to streamline the traditionally heavy real estate industry, Apt, told me about a company a friend of his was starting and asked if I wanted an intro. As a quick check, I showed the company’s website to Puja. She’s the skeptical and sensible one in our relationship. Her reaction: “Woah. That is incredible.” That’s a word that I typically use about startups, but not her.

Outfit is incredible as a product because it puts the dream we all have of living in a space we’re proud to show off within reach. Outfit is incredible as a business because it uses software to scale a traditionally unscalable product in a massive market while maintaining high margins.

I’m excited to back Outfit with the Not Boring Syndicate for a few reasons:

Market. The DIY Home Improvement Market is way bigger than you’d think — $46 billion, 38% of all home improvement projects are DIY — and growing, particularly as COVID pushes more people to buy and improve homes. Young startups in the home renovation space have recently raised tens of millions from top investors.
Product. There’s no solution in the market that sits between traditional DIY and hiring contractors. Outfit uses software, processes, and buying power to build the first scalable architecture product.
Founder. Ian Janicki is a second-generation architect with software and design skills honed at top tech companies. He’s one of the most compelling founders I’ve met.
Customers. Outfit’s customers are middle-class, suburban, and young. They’re not the typical startup target. They’re the IKEA generation, who want to get involved and roll up their sleeves. Outfit is to renovations what IKEA is to furniture, a natural next step.
Business Model. Outfit is asset light and scalable in an industry that… isn’t. They don’t need to deal with scaling labor (which is hard) or working across jurisdictions (which is really, really hard).
Vision. When Outfit is successful, you’ll be able to buy a new look for your home as easily as you can buy a new outfit for yourself.

We put the deal live on AngelList last week, and already, AngelList itself has written a big check into Outfit via the Not Boring Syndicate. AngelList sees thousands of deals and only writes checks into a few, so it’s a big stamp of approval for what Ian is building. Read on to learn what they (and I) are so excited about.

The DIY Market

If you’ve felt a strong urge to refresh your bathroom or modernize your kitchen during COVID, you’re not alone. Bank of America surveyed over 1,000 Americans, and more than 70% planned to tackle home improvement projects during the pandemic. Even pre-COVID, the DIY Home Improvement industry was worth an eye-popping $46 billion. There are 2.6 million DIY bathroom projects and 1.6 million DIY kitchen projects in the US every year.

This trend is just getting started. Last Monday, I wrote that We’re Never Going Back to the office in the same way again. One of the second-order consequences is that people will be moving more often, potentially out of major cities and to places where they can afford to buy a home.

Ian actually built transplant.to to understand where people are moving earlier this year

Another is that people won’t be commuting and putting in face time with their bosses, meaning that they’ll have more time to spend on other things. Plus, the insides of our homes are no longer a secret reserved for our closest friends and family; they serve as the background to our Zooms which mean that they serve as the backdrops to our lives.

Two startups launched in the past eighteen months have seen early success. Block, launched in early 2019, has raised $21.5 million from investors including NEA, Lerer Hippeau, and Obvious Ventures. Made, launched early this year, raised a $9 million seed round from Base10, FoundersFund, and Felicis. Block and Made offer a great service to customers in New York and San Francisco, respectively, with over $30k to spare, but there’s a massive opportunity still up for grabs to serve the rest of the country with a better option.

That’s where Outfit comes in.

Meet Outfit

Outfit is DIY renovations in a box. It’s unbundling architectural drawings into step-by-step directions. As a non-design person who managed a design team at Breather and tried to understand what drawings meant, I can tell you that this is like translating Ancient Greek to English.

Starting with kitchen renovations, Outfit fills the gap between “figure it all out on your own” and “hire a contractor” by sending everything you need for the job to your door and providing interactive step-by-step instructions in an easy-to-use app.

Outfit exists between traditional DIY, which is the cheapest option but comes with a ton of uncertainty and often yields subpar results, and hiring a general contractor, which can be at least 3x more expensive than DIY, requires permitting, and often comes in over time and over budget. Outfit uses software to combine the satisfaction and savings of DIY with the guidance and quality of hiring a contractor.

Here’s how it works.

Choose a project template.
Take pictures and simple measurements of your space.
Outfit sends you instructions, tools, and materials.
You do the renovation yourself, and chat with Outfit experts right inside the app.

Et voila!

Outfit does all of this for only a small mark-up to a full DIY because it’s able to take advantage of a few things:

Software. Today, Outfit customers can take pictures and measurements of their space and receive a custom combination of instructions and tutorials. Over time, technology will make the process easier and faster. For example, getting LIDAR scan used to be done with a super-expensive device, and now it’s on every new iPhone; trends like that mean that Outfit will be able to automate more of the process moving forward.
Negotiation at Scale. Outfit orders all of the materials and tools for its customers and coordinates deliveries, meaning that it can get discounts with vendors beyond what a general Pro gets.
Delivery. Home improvement retailers compete with Amazon for convenient next-day delivery, so they’re offering unbelievably cheap materials delivery. They’ve already done the hard part of getting these heavy items to the edge, which Outfit piggybacks on.

To be clear, this is going to be difficult to pull off. No one has ever done it before. As a general rule of thumb, architecture and construction don’t scale. But Outfit’s founder, Ian Janicki, has spent most of his life building up the skills to change that.

Ian: Product-Founder Fit

Like most of the deals we do in the Not Boring Syndicate, Outfit is very early stage. It’s a small team with an early product and a small batch of customers in their Beta. At this very early stage, where company and idea are one in the same, you’re betting on a few things:

The idea seems feasible.
The market is very big, or if the company is successful, it will create its own big market.
The Founder(s).

Of these three, the Founder is the most important. The idea may change, and the market may not even exist yet. If it does, it’s likely full of unwelcoming incumbents looking to beat the new entrant out of business. A great Founder can overcome those obstacles, evolving the idea based on customer feedback while staying true to the vision, willing a market into being, and fighting for their big piece of it.

Ian Janicki is the perfect Founder for Outfit. A second-generation architect, Ian grew up in the trades, working construction as a teenager before studying at the nation’s top undergrad architecture program, Cornell.

What the hell happened in 2015?!

While at Cornell, Ian learned how to engineer software as well as buildings. When he graduated, understanding that the path for a junior architect is a miserable one, he decided to head to San Francisco to try his hand at software instead. Over the past eight years, he’s worked as a Product Designer and Product Manager at open source mobile-app platform Xamarin (acquired by Microsoft), Microsoft, construction unicorn Katerra, and design unicorn Figma (the very same software with which I make all my beautiful images!).

He always knew that he wanted to get back into architecture, but not in the traditional sense. Instead, he’s on a mission to make architecture scale with software. Outfit is the manifestation of that mission, and of the lessons he learned, particularly at Katerra.

Traditional architecture relies on teams of junior people to churn plan after drawing after plan after drawing. Pre-fab has high fixed costs in a cyclical industry, tough labor arbitrage, and can’t reach economies of scale.

Ian’s first exploration to make the process easier was to build an API for building permits and inspections, which, if you’ve ever had to deal with building permits and inspections is an absolute nightmare. The process requires in-person interaction across 20,000 separate jurisdictions with no standardization, no incentive to improve, and all of the fun that comes with dealing with local government. No go.

He then looked at existing models, like Made and Block and realized three things:

They’re difficult to scale.
They still need to deal with permitting.
They’ve left a massive hole in the middle of the market.

Made and Block appeal to the segment of the market that is willing to spend $30-50k to have someone else design and build beautiful bathrooms and kitchens for them. But that’s a small piece of the overall market. Outfit is for the rest.

Target Customer and Marketing

One of my favorite slides I’ve ever seen in a pitch deck is Ian’s customer slide, in which he defines Outfit’s customer as:

“A middle-class, suburban, young couple (not you).”

Often, companies whose products VCs can see using themselves have an easier time fundraising than products that they can’t. It’s one of the reasons that Airbnb had such a hard time raising money initially. What VC in their right mind would let a stranger stay in their house for a hundred bucks, or sleep on someone’s air mattress to save a few dollars?

Outfit rightly calls out that it probably isn’t for most VCs. If you have more money than time, Outfit isn’t the solution for you. But Outfit’s customer is most of the country. They are:

Low on Cash, High on Time. Chances are, they put their life savings into the down payment on the home. They’re willing to spend the time to turn their investment into a home.
Used to Digital Experiences. They don’t want to deal with existing solutions, which are in-person, over-the-phone, and paper-based.
Willing to Pay for DIY as a Premium. The “IKEA Effect,” from a 2011 HBS study in which people assign higher value to things that they created, shows customers willing to pay 63% more for DIY.

Early Outfit customers building their space

If you’ve been reading Not Boring for a while, you might remember a brilliant July guest post by native Texan Ali Montag titled Monopolies and Magnolias. She told the story of an American business empire that most of us didn’t even know existed: Chip and Joanna Gaines’ Magnolia. Launched from the popularity of the couple’s hit HGTV show, Fixer Upper, Magnolia now spans DTC, retail, a luxury hotel, a construction business, a seven-city real estate agency, best-selling books, a campus with restaurants and a shopping center, and more than 20 million social followers, with a cable network on the way. Magnolia’s secret is this:

Magnolia is a monopoly because it serves an audience with few other exciting options. Magnolia is about slowing down. It’s about watching the sunset and enjoying a plate of chocolate chip cookies with your family. It’s about using real, full fat butter. That’s a signal many American women are eager to open their pocketbooks to share. Lighting a $28 valencia orange scented candle from Magnolia sends a signal to houseguests, family members, and to yourself: Home is important.

She didn’t know it at the time, but Ali might as well have been writing about Outfit. It’s built for people for whom home is important, people Silicon Valley companies typically target only once they need to “cross the chasm,” people who want nice things but want them to be accessible and permanent, with some of their own elbow grease mixed in.

Most of America drives pickup trucks — the Ford F-Series has been the best-selling vehicle in the US for decades — and when they want to do home improvements, they watch HGTV instead of calling the interior designer, and head to Home Depot instead of paying someone to do it for them.

Outfit has a smart plan in motion to reach these customers efficiently (I can’t give away all the tricks here though ???? ). Janicki is betting that once Outfit reaches these customers, they won’t just buy, they’ll share, too. Outfit is a product that was built to show off. Who doesn’t want to show before and after pics of the room that they built themselves? What influencer wouldn’t want to prove that they can build, too?

Seriously, pause for a second and think of your friends. How many of them would spend a few weeks on a renovation without posting at least 5-10 pictures?

Currently, with a small team and six months under its belt, Outfit already has hundreds of customers on the waitlist and influencers already reaching out to partner. Oh yeah, and it has its own HGTV star lined up. Anthony Carrino, host of TheBuild.TV is set to join the Outfit team to lead content and growth.

This is going to be a major advantage for Outfit: by targeting the customers others aren’t, and helping them share their progress, Outfit will build a loyal fan base that will help spread the product organically. And as customers feel that satisfaction of the first job, they’ll want to come back for more.

Repeat, vocal customers are just one piece of a business model that Janicki … architected … for asset light scale.

The Business Model

In order to make architecture scalable, it has to be asset light, meaning that Outfit doesn’t own materials or hire contractors, it has to leverage software to replace repeatable processes, and it has to avoid permitting.

That’s exactly what Outfit does. For an industry like home improvement that can seem a little bit messy, Outfit’s business model is surprisingly clean.

After customers send Outfit pictures of their space and pick a package, Outfit gives them one price for the entire job. For a light kitchen refresh, that might be $1,500. That’s all the customer needs to worry about paying.

From that $1,500, Outfit needs to:

Acquire the Customer, which it will do as outlined above. We expect CAC to decrease as customers share their work and come back to do more renos.
Purchase Materials from big box home improvement stores to specialty suppliers, using its professional discount, which will increase with scale.
Ship materials to customers, which vendors now offer cheaply in order to compete with online retailers.
Create a to-do list based on customer’s space starting with in-house and contracted labor, and moving increasingly to automated over time as LIDAR, AR, and other technologies become more ubiquitous and Outfit learns what works best for which specs.
Support customers with on-demand expert help.

Outfit expects that once it’s a few hundred projects in, it will be able to generate a positive gross margin of around 20% on each job, and that those margins will improve as it benefits from scale, automation, larger ticket sizes, and more repeat customers.

It’s important to remember that while Outfit is in the real estate and construction space, it’s a technology company. Although it deals with home renovations, something people have been doing as long as there have been homes, Outfit is only possible now, for a few reasons:

Abundance Necessitates Curation. Ecommerce has put everything online. Now, the challenge is to curate those materials. There are 100,000 faucets! Which one is best for my kitchen? You need an architect to figure that out.
Advanced Sensors. The technology to scan and map a space now comes built-in on new iPhones, and will only become more ubiquitous.
The Missing Piece of Ecommerce. We buy and configure laptops, cars, vacation rentals, and even homes (see: Opendoor) online. But until now, we haven’t been able to buy architecture online. Everything that once seemed crazy to buy online is normal now.
The Instagram Economy. Matcha took off in the United States because its green hue pops on Instagram. Outfit can go viral today in a way it never could have before.
The Airbnb Economy. Airbnb is going public today, and the Airbnb economy is only going to grow from here. Outfit is a phenomenal solution for semi-professional Airbnb hosts who want to spruce their places up in order to generate more income.
Millennials Are Buying Homes. They’re the IKEA generation, and they’re used to doing everything online and on their phone.

Now is the time for Outfit, but it’s just the beginning. Ian’s vision is to change the way we design and build spaces.

Outfit’s Vision

With the money from its seed round, Ian plans to grow the team, build a self-serve eCommerce product, and continue to complete projects. Lots and lots of projects. When we spoke, he told me that he was starting with simple cosmetic projects in the bathroom and kitchen to get reps under the company’s belt, and that he wanted to do hundreds of them in the next year.

As Outfit iterates through all of those projects, it will:

Build up a database of common floorplans and and edge cases that it can use to automate future projects.
Expand its library of instructions and resources based on customer feedback.
Understand the pain points that customers have throughout the process and build solutions to help get them unstuck.
Grow its customer base, who will become repeat customers and brand advocates by sharing their work.

Helping customers do great work is crucially important. They’ll start with an easy project, get it right, and move on confidently to something a little more complicated. They’ll also want to stick with Outfit for the next room so they can easily match the aesthetic from the first. The combination of people completing and sharing more projects is Outfit’s Flywheel.

Outfit will learn too, and it will be able to confidently expand into more project types, and to make each project more modular and magical. Its vision is to “build the buy button for architecture.”

Imagine seeing a kitchen you love on Pinterest or Instagram, clicking “Buy on Outfit,” and getting materials and instructions delivered right to you. You might even be able to say, “I want to do steps 1-7 and 10-13 myself, but I would love to hire someone to help with 8 and 9.” Because Outfit is building a database of detailed steps, they can quickly and easily bid out the more challenging parts of the process, removing frustration while letting customers keep the sense of accomplishment from a job well done. At the same time, influencers can monetize their spaces by partnering with Outfit. Puja would buy Something Navy’s kitchen on Outfit right now if she could.

Ultimately, DIY is a wedge into making architecture scalable using software. By working with the people who are willing to get their hands dirty upfront, Outfit will be able to work out the kinks in its software, logistics, and processes until anyone, anywhere can take a picture of a room, choose what they want it to look like, and get everything they need, from instructions, to materials, to labor, delivered to their door. Today, that’s kitchens in houses. In the future, that could mean full homes or offices.

It’s the Magnolia, HGTV dream, accessible to anyone. It’s not hard to imagine the company’s customers starring in an Outfit show on HGTV one day soon.

Risks

Early stage investing comes with major risks, and Outfit is no different. As with any early stage investment, the numbers suggest that you should expect any money you put into an early stage startup to go to $0. Here are a few Outfit-specific risks:

Solo Founder. Ian is working with a small team, but he’s still a solo founder. Many investors like to see co-founders with complementary skill sets working together to start a company.
Execution. Outfit is early. It has only completed one project so far with several others kicking-off later this month, and new challenges will arise as it tries to expand and scale.
Business Model. Outfit’s model relies on getting customers to pay a slight premium for the full package, and on getting its costs down using software. To the extent that it needs to do more things manually over the long term, margins will be hurt.
Competition. Competitors may try to copy aspects of Outfit’s business, large incumbents may enter the space, or new startups might form to compete.

There are certainly risks that neither I nor Outfit is currently aware of that could sink the business. Again, this is not investment advice, and you should do your own diligence before deciding whether to invest.

The Outfit Opportunity

Building asset light, software enabled real estate and construction businesses is a holy grail that many have talked about attempting and few have achieved. If I had a dollar for every time I heard the phrase “asset light” while I was at Breather, I’d have more dollars than I could count.

There’s a reason for that. Real estate and construction is the largest industry left largely untouched by software. The prize for the winners will be massive. In this case, the DIY Home Improvement market is a $46 billion annual prize, and if Outfit is successful, it will blur the lines between professional and DIY, giving it line of sight to a $250 billion market, just in the US, and just in housing.

The two leading home renovation startups have raised over $30 million combined in the last 20 months from top investors. Because of Outfit’s asset light approach, it’s raising a much smaller amount to tackle an even bigger opportunity — one that touches every part of the country, and not just the coasts. Already, Ian has top angels onboard including Gumroad’s Sahil Lavignia, Runway’s Siqi Chen, Mercury’s Immad Akhund, Kleiner Perkins EIR Thomson Nguyen, and Xamarin and GitHub’s Nat Friedman, Ian’s old boss.

Outfit feels like one of those opportunities that we’ll look back on in five years and say, “Remember when we thought this was just about bathrooms?” In a world in which spaces will need to change and adapt more than ever before, new solutions in architecture and construction have the potential to reshape how we interact with the buildings around us. It’s why I love Apt, and why I’m so excited about Outfit.

As excited as I am by the potential, Ian is madly passionate about it. It’s clear that this is his life’s work, that he’s the right person for the job, and that like the tradesman, architect, and engineer that he is, he’s going to experiment, tinker, build, demolish, and rebuild until he gets it right.

I am thrilled to have the opportunity to participate in this competitive seed round, and to get the band back together and partner with Jonathan Wasserstrum, who runs one of AngelList’s most successful syndicates and its top PropTech rolling fund.

[Editor’s note: Originally published at Not Boring. The deal is now full.]

The post Outfit: Not Boring Investment Memo appeared first on GeekEstate Blog.

Meet the Real Estate Tech Entrepreneurs: Monty Ngan & Hannah Le from Ascend Build

Wed, 16 Dec 2020 18:00:16 GMT

In our latest real estate tech entrepreneur interview, we spoke with Monty Ngan and Hannah Le from Ascend Build.

Without further ado…

Who are you and what do you do?

Monty – I’m the co-founder of Ascend Build – we help real estate developers and property managers optimize rental pricing. I graduated from Wharton in Business Analytics and
International Relations + worked at McKinsey prior to starting my current company. This is my second startup – the first one was an indigenous language preservation platform that I launched with the Philippine Department of Education.

Hannah – I’m a co-founder at Ascend leading engineering and product development. Previous to
this, I’ve worked with the Head of Medical Physics at Princess Margaret Hospital to create a
a fast, personalized adaptive framework for prostate cancer treatment and worked on various
consulting projects with WealthSimple, TD, and Microsoft through The Knowledge Society.

What problem does your product/service solve?

Our vision at Ascend is to help make real estate pricing and purchasing decisions more transparent – starting with leases. With Ascend, our developer clients can look up every property posted within a city and receive real-time analytics on how their leases compare to those of their peers. We utilize over 80,000+ datapoints, updated daily, including past rents, quality of buildings, and area amenities to help developers predict the best rent price. Hannah and I have spoken to over 120+ development firms over the past months to discover the main pain points they face, and were pleasantly surprised to learn how customers could now use our tools to derive insights they couldn’t previously, like “How much was a townhouse that went off- market in 1 day with 2 beds, 1 bath, pet friendly, has a pool and spa priced at?”

What are you most excited about right now?

Working with clients in Vancouver since we launched has been the most exciting part since we launched last month! We’ve gotten requests from RE developers/property managers in SF, LA, and even London to bring our app to their cities and are very excited to continue expanding our reach. We have a lot of improvements to the platform coming up and are working on predicting ideal rent for our client’s properties.

What’s next for you?

We’re expanding to Toronto, LA, and SF in the coming months and looking to work with real estate developers, property managers, and asset managers in these cities ( we’re also open to other cities- we would love to connect on [Monty’s] LinkedIn). We’re excited to meet new clients and are working with the next 5 companies to sign on as design partners.

What’s a cause you’re passionate about and why?

Monty – Language preservation. I grew up in the Philippines to a family that code-switched between Tagalog, Bisaya, Fookien and English. At times, there were some words in one language I could never express in another. Growing up around a mix of several cultures – I’ve come to realize that a person’s language is tied to their identity and enables them to understand their culture more. Losing it means forgetting centuries of perspectives, values and history. Between 1950 and 2010, 230 languages went extinct and ~3500 more are predicted to do so by 2100 unless we put more emphasis on this issue.

Hannah – Human health. I think there are lots of technology infrastructure innovations that are coming up in the following years that can really change how healthcare delivery works that lead to longer healthspan and lifespan. An example could be a wearable that better analyzes metabolites in your body to proactively inform you of diseases, shifting our system from reactive to proactive. Another could be utilizing data and machine learning models to come up with drug molecules with higher efficacy. Especially during COVID, what are some ways we can utilize data and computer science to proactively create vaccines for future, potential pandemics? These are questions that I’m really fascinated by!

Thanks to Hannah and Monty for sharing their story. If you’d like to connect, Find Monty’s LinkedIn Here and Hannah’s LinkedIn here.

We’re constantly looking for great real estate tech entrepreneurs to feature. If that’s you, please read this post — then drop us a line (community @ geekestatelabs dot com).

The post Meet the Real Estate Tech Entrepreneurs: Monty Ngan & Hannah Le from Ascend Build appeared first on GeekEstate Blog.

Realtor.com Prevails with Avail

Wed, 16 Dec 2020 01:57:01 GMT

The property management software for DIY landlords sector that we’ve covered in such depth got a jolt of excitement today: Realtor.com acquired Avail. The deal will help Realtor.com “expand into the rental space, extend its support for landlords, augment current rental listing content, grow its audience and build brand affinity and long-term relationships with renters.” Avail CEO Ryan Coon, one of GEM’s founding members, shared a few thoughts on the Avail blog, saying “Landlords will have access to best-in-class tools and resources and renters will have a one-stop-shop for finding, securing, and living in their new space.”

A huge congratulations…all the way around. This is a fantastic acquisition by David Doctorow (GEM member) and everyone involved on the rentals side at NewsCorp / Realtor.com. Meanwhile, the deal gives Ryan, Nate Smoyer (GEM member), and the rest of the crew unfiltered access to a sizable audience of renters. You probably know that I’m a bull when it comes to landlord tech // property management software as a sector–and couldn’t be more excited to see the continued growth of this category. The audience front is a three-horse race (the fourth would be Zumper): With CoStar having already cozied up to Cozy, it’s Zillow’s move now.

Reminder: our prior product review of Avail is here.

The post Realtor.com Prevails with Avail appeared first on GeekEstate Blog.

2021 REACH & REACH Commercial Now Accepting Applications

Mon, 14 Dec 2020 17:48:19 GMT

REACH operates a variety of accelerator programs around the globe, created and operated by Second Century Ventures and backed by NAR. The program offers education, mentorship and exposure for technology companies working to scale their businesses across the U.S. residential and commercial real estate markets and expand into adjacent markets, including insurance, mortgage and financial services.

Applications for its flagship 2021 REACH & REACH Commercial classes are now open, but only until January 31st. That means, if you’re an early-stage startup interested, you best start the process now…

Apply Now

The post 2021 REACH & REACH Commercial Now Accepting Applications appeared first on GeekEstate Blog.

Meet The Real Estate Tech Entrepreneur: Ryan Barone from RentRedi

Tue, 08 Dec 2020 18:35:38 GMT

In our latest real estate tech entrepreneur interview, we’re speaking with Ryan Barone from RentRedi.

Without further ado…

Who are you and what do you do?

I’m Ryan Barone, CEO and co-founder of RentRedi, a mobile-first property management software. I started RentRedi out of the frustrating process of being on the tenant application side of the rental process, and after talking to landlords saw an opportunity to fix the landlord-tenant relationship. Today I’m focused on listening to our landlord’s pain points and feedback with the goal of making RentRedi an easy-to-use mobile technology.

What problem does your product/service solve?

RentRedi reduces pain points in managing properties and landlord-tenant relationships. With one platform and one flat price, the entire landlord process can be managed within our platform. And, as a landlord’s portfolio scales, the price of RentRedi never does, I built RentRedi this way based on feedback from landlords when I first started the company! I want to help landlords streamline cashflow on new investments while also self-managing their current investments.

What are you most excited about right now?

I am most excited about our latest partnership with Latchel, a maintenance services coordination company. We are the only property management software with a direct integration with Latchel that offers our landlords 24/7 emergency and full maintenance coordination services. We’re especially happy to offer this solution for our customers because property maintenance and finding a good contractor is a huge pain point for landlords.

What’s next for you?

I am gearing up for our Series A round and looking forward to maintaining and scaling the incredible user growth we’ve seen in the last year.

What’s a cause you’re passionate about and why?

I’m passionate about providing opportunities to students in colleges & universities. Most recently, the RentRedi team has set up internships and hiring opportunities with Pace University—the university I graduated from!

Thanks to Ryan for sharing his story. If you’d like to connect, find him on LinkedIn here.

We’re constantly looking for great real estate tech entrepreneurs to feature. If that’s you, please read this post — then drop me a line (drew @ geekestatelabs dot com).

The post Meet The Real Estate Tech Entrepreneur: Ryan Barone from RentRedi appeared first on GeekEstate Blog.

Early-Stage Fundraising Office Hours on December 8th

Thu, 03 Dec 2020 20:57:10 GMT

The core of the GEM is serving founders. Beyond being in the know about industry developments, a big part of founders’ lives is fundraising. We help on that front in three primary ways:

Practice Pitches: Usually a 5-7 minute pitch and 20-30 minutes of Q&A/feedback with 8-12 peers (Rabbu was the most recent “hot seat” participant)
Office Hours: Discussion about raising seed / Series A capital among peers.
Investor-Founder Connections: We put investment opportunities in front of the 30+ VCs and angel investors in the GEM (and, sometimes, to relevant investors outside of the community).

We’re holding our next early-stage fundraising office hours next week (Tuesday, December 8th) and have room for a few non-GEM members to join. In addition to founders in the VC/angel trenches, Jonathan Bednarsh and Mark Hurst will be attending to lend their experience and perspective to the conversation.

Logistics:

Google Meeting. Note this is NOT a webinar.

Tuesday December 8th at 11 AM PST / 2 PM EST.

Limited to 15 participants.

Are you a founder actively raising a pre-seed, seed, or Series A interested in attending? Email me your pitch deck (drew at geekestatelabs dot com) and I’ll provide a calendar invite. We have room for about 5 more.

Happy fundraising.

The post Early-Stage Fundraising Office Hours on December 8th appeared first on GeekEstate Blog.

Dear AirBnB, Thank You

Wed, 02 Dec 2020 17:15:05 GMT

[Editor’s note: Originally published on Vertical.]

In 2017, I had a quick day trip to San Francisco. I was visiting family just south of the Bay Area in Carmel-by-the-Sea and needed a place to stay for the night after some meetings.

I plugged into AirBnB and found a private room with Mimi and Mosh right in Presidio Heights (where I could run in the morning) for $193 per night.

I was probably impatient with them as I staggered in late that night after a day full of meetings and they walked me through all of the amenities of the place. But they were very kind with me and seemingly delighted in pointing out the little tea kettle they had bought for guests with assorted teas for the next morning.

It was a wonderful, inviting experience and I felt safe and it felt private. I left them a 5-star review and they did the same for me.

It was perfect. I was a stranger to them and they were to me. And it didn’t matter.

I had a safe, private, well-located place to sleep on a business trip and they got an extra couple hundred dollars. We were both happy.

That’s what Brian, Joe, Nate, and the AirBnB team created: a place for strangers to spend the night in the same house . . . happily. Peacefully.

Now, I’m sure you are reading all the same articles I am about AirBnB.

It’s fun to see who is going to be the big financial winner and all the ways they are taking care of employees and hosts. I’m sure plenty of people are scoffing at yet another Silicon Valley tech startup getting huge with hyper-growth metrics.

All of that coverage is warranted and usually worth the read. But I would encourage you to look a little deeper than the financials and think about something that AirBnB taught me and taught us about ourselves.

For context, if you happen to be reading this in some future year, you should know that 2020 has been pretty tough for most of us. We’ve had this crippling global pandemic that shut down the planet.

From Black Lives Matter to mask-wearing, somehow every decision or statement we made this year seemed to be about who we vote for.

Add to that the worst hurricane season on record, an escalating trade war between the US and China, and the death of James freaking Bond, and I am just done with all of this.

Suffice it to say – 2020 has been a pretty tough year and it’s easy to get bogged down in all the negativity.

And then there is AirBnB.

As a startup investor, I love a good origin story. With the tales of maxing-out credit cards, selling political cereal, and taking pictures of early listings in NY, AirBnB’s origins are legendary.

But one aspect of their story stands out to me and should give hope to all of us in this year of woe.

Any remarkable startup is a little controversial and AirBnB was no exception. Investors couldn’t deny the hustle and talent of Joe and Brian as they built it from the beginning. What they could question was human nature.

“Why would I want a stranger staying in my home?” went the common objection.

You see, most investors are so jaded about people that they assume the worst of our nature. We are inherently self-serving creatures and will revert to our most selfish and protective impulses more often than not.

So it’s highly understandable that your average venture capitalist would look at a young AirBnB, with just a few hundred listings on the platform, and assume that most of us would NEVER be comfortable letting a stranger sleep in our home.

That would be crazy. People are difficult and mean and rude and terrible towards each other.

Who would do that?

Well, it turns out more than a few of us. Mimi and Mosh weren’t the only ones willing to open their home.

To be clear, as with any endeavor that involves large numbers of human beings behaving around each other, AirBnB has had its problems with parties and illegal activity on their platform. I don’t want to make light of those and I do commend the ongoing work the team is doing there.

But that misses the bigger point – AirBnB created a place where strangers can trust each other enough to share a roof.

Doesn’t matter who you voted for. Doesn’t matter where you are from or what you believe.

We are all just people stumbling our way through our own stories looking for places to rest and feel safe.

AirBnB allows us to find strangers that want to provide that. Not hotel brands we trust. Not a college buddy’s couch. Strangers.

And that is truly remarkable.

So here in late 2020, I hope we can all take a moment to pause and reflect on that.

Try to forget about politics for a minute. Forget about how different we are from each other.

Just for a moment, think about the millions of people who have shared their homes with complete strangers. I know we can be terrible to each other, but we can also be kind, welcoming, and get special tea kettles for people we’ve never met.

Because when it comes down to it, we all just want a place to rest, feel safe, and belong. AirBnB not only created a place for us to feel that, but they made a place where we can feel that sense of belonging among total strangers in most cities and countries around the world. And in this terrible year we need that sense of belonging and connectivity more than ever.

So whenever Joe, Brian, and the team go ring the opening bell in the next few weeks to signal their company going public, stand up with me and cheer for them. Raise a glass or tweet your heart out.

Not because of the financial success and rewards, but for reminding us of something we seemingly forgot in 2020 – we are more similar than we are different and strangers can still be kind to each other.

From me and my family to the team at AirBnB, thank you! I needed that reminder.

The post Dear AirBnB, Thank You appeared first on GeekEstate Blog.

Seeking the Most Inventive Start-ups in Home Building

Tue, 01 Dec 2020 20:05:00 GMT

HousingTech is curating the Start-Up Zone at the NAHB’s International Builders Show Feb. 9-12, which is an annual event for the housing industry that draws 100,000 people to Orlando.

This year it will be a virtual gathering, but it will be its usual powerful platform for showcasing the industry’s most interesting, exciting, and promising companies – this is all about connecting customers, capital, and media to companies that are poised to transform the industry with the solution/service/product that they are bringing to the market.

We are looking for emerging companies, 3 years or younger, to be among 25 that are featured in the Start-Up Zone and compete for Most Innovative Company 2021. Applications should be submitted prior to December 15.

Apply NOW

The post Seeking the Most Inventive Start-ups in Home Building appeared first on GeekEstate Blog.

Meet the Real Estate Tech Entrepreneur: Logan Ransley from Landlord Studio

Tue, 01 Dec 2020 16:00:03 GMT

In our latest real estate tech entrepreneur interview, we’re speaking with Logan Ransley from Landlord Studio.

Without further ado…

Who are you and what do you do?

I’m a co-founder of Landlord Studio – a software platform designed specifically to help rental property owners track their income and expenses for tax time. Specifically, I am focused on helping our customers get the most out of our platform, and building strategies for engaging new members.

What problem does your product/service solve?

For landlords who are self-managing their rental properties, our platform offers a purpose-built method of tracking income and expenses, harnessing automation including open banking to streamline payment tracking and management. The software is designed as a globally-applicable alternative to the patchwork of tools currently used by landlords self-managing their properties, including accounting software, cash-in-hand or direct debit payments, and spreadsheets.

In addition to financial tracking, Landlord Studio assists with property management by automating workflow and centralizing information to offer a full-service cloud-based solution that can be used across desktop and mobile.

What are you most excited about right now?

I’m very excited about our feature roadmap for 2021. Particularly right now in the time of Covid, there’s a real need to create solutions that minimize the call for in-person contact between tenants and landlords, as well as empower tenants to better manage their own payments through a streamlined and digital format. Our Online Rent Collection has been the most important feature released to help us solve these issues.

What’s next for you?

We’ve got an exciting plan for 2021. This includes a fundraise, overall team expansion, and push to grow our userbase and provide more value to them. Since day one, our team has committed to a long-term mission of becoming the world’s best property management and financial tracking solution for “do-it-yourself” landlords.

What’s a cause you’re passionate about and why?

I’m very passionate about our forests. Originally I’m from New Zealand which has beautiful and elegant landscapes. I grew up around our natural forestry and it’s been something I’ve been passionate about protecting so we can enjoy it long term. Alongside that, I thoroughly enjoy working with young entrepreneurs to help them inspire change in the world.

Thanks to Logan for sharing his story. If you’d like to connect, find him on LinkedIn here.

We’re constantly looking for great real estate tech entrepreneurs to feature. If that’s you, please read this post — then drop me a line (drew @ geekestatelabs dot com).

The post Meet the Real Estate Tech Entrepreneur: Logan Ransley from Landlord Studio appeared first on GeekEstate Blog.

Meet the Real Estate Tech Entrepreneur: Jesse DePinto from Frontdesk

Wed, 25 Nov 2020 19:56:01 GMT

In our latest real estate tech entrepreneur interview, we’re speaking with Jesse DePinto from Frontdesk.

Without further ado…

Who are you and what do you do?

I’m Jesse DePinto, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Frontdesk.
Today, I lead our talented product and sales teams at Frontdesk.

What problem does your product/service solve?

Short-term rental marketplaces like Airbnb have been proven to help real estate owners generate more income. But generating maximum revenue and ensuring the most protection for your property requires time, technology, and experience. Our new full-spectrum management platform, Frontdesk Flex, provides everything you need to earn more money and save more time, with solutions ranging from software-only to full-service, including cleaning and other on-site services. Here is a fun video we made to show you how it works.

What are you most excited about right now?

Despite the travel industry struggles in 2020, it’s been a year of transformative change. Consumers are favoring short-term rentals over hotels this year, and we believe those habits will stick. Believe it or not, short-term rental revenue expectations have already rebounded in most geographies; meanwhile, hotels are struggling to fill their rooms. Airbnb’s IPO on the horizon demonstrates that short-term rentals are the new-normal in this post-COVID world. There has never been a better opportunity for single-family and multifamily real estate professionals to leverage this seismic shift in consumer demand to be successful.

What’s next for you?

Now that we have launched our flagship technology platform, Flex, and closed our Series A financing, we’re ready to scale! Personally, I’m moving my focus away from product and sales and more toward leadership. Our product-obsessed focus served us well to build the best product on the market, but it will be our teammates and their leaders who take us to the next level. With the vision set, I’m here to first and foremost to support our team with these ambitious growth plans and then get out of their way.

What’s a cause you’re passionate about and why?

I’m passionate about fighting poverty. Until our basic physiological
needs are met (food, water rest … think Maslow’s Hierarchy of
Needs), we will continue seeing suffering by so many in the world. The
Riverwest Food Pantry and Pathfinders are my favorite local charities in Milwaukee. They are doing incredible work for our community.

Thanks to Jesse for sharing his story. If you’d like to connect, find him on LinkedIn here.

We’re constantly looking for great real estate tech entrepreneurs to feature. If that’s you, please read this post — then drop me a line (drew @ geekestatelabs dot com).

The post Meet the Real Estate Tech Entrepreneur: Jesse DePinto from Frontdesk appeared first on GeekEstate Blog.

A House Party to Tackle Homelessness

Fri, 20 Nov 2020 17:11:18 GMT

House Party is a one-hour online experience where the New Story team and community will tackle homelessness by celebrating the gift of home and building them for others — a lot of them. In one night, we’ll come together and fund an entire community of homes in Nacajuca, Mexico. Talk about a happy ending to 2020 we could all use.

This may be the only party where there is no commute, no cleanup, and no dress code — the night is what we make it. And we plan to make it the most meaningful hour your family can spend on a screen this year.

So if Zoom calls and Schitt’s Creek are no longer doing it for you and you’re free the evening of December 6th, RSVP to House Party here (when we get closer to the date you’ll receive an email with a link to stream House Party from the comfort of your home.)

OUR GOAL
Our goal is to raise $1M so we can complete a community of 100 homes for families who need them most.

One hundred families in Nacajuca, Mexico, have no place to call home. In the middle of a pandemic, they’re left to their unstable self-made shelter that’s prone to flooding six months of the year.

We can’t stand that. And we know you can’t either.

House Party is our chance to move towards impact by providing a rapid response to a dire situation. Homes have never mattered more. Let’s get to work.

ABOUT NEW STORY
We’re a team working to end homelessness. It’s a big goal, but we’ve seen it attract bold people — like you! Sure, building the world’s first community of 3D printed homes is cool. So is building our own data-collection tool to track impact. But they’re just means to fulfill our big dream.Our favorite part of it all?
‍
The 11,000+ lives impacted. Thanks to our donors, we’ve helped build over 2,300 homes across 25 communities. And we’re just getting started.

The post A House Party to Tackle Homelessness appeared first on GeekEstate Blog.